Particletree

Similar story - Kevin, one of the founders of Wufoo, does a great job of explaining how he grew the product by word of mouth. He built it from the trust of his users, most of which was from http://particletree.com/. It's fascinating how much emphasis he puts on interacting personally with the paid users and how they scaled that. Definitely a lot of hard work, but it paid off when they had some server trouble when Wufoo first launched - their old users trusted them and backed them up when some of the initial comments were negative. Long story short, he didn't do any search advertising either. Interview here: http://mixergy.com/wufoo-kevin-hale/

Wufoo.com not on the list. Was launched out on success of their blog http://www.particletree.com/

I know the obvious solutions for very low level profiling are xhprof and xdebug, but there is a time and a place for doing one off profiling. I can also recommend PHP Quick Profiler, released by Particle Tree a few years back, if you enjoy shiny things. http://particletree.com/features/php-quick-profiler/ This bad boy has one added benefit over the others: console logging. Along the same token, you could be using a combination of Firefox with the FirePHP plugin if you like the idea of logging PHP directly to your firebug console: http://www.firephp.org

I found this tutorial that did a great job explaining it: http://particletree.com/features/rediscovering-the-button-element/ The icons are from FAMFAM: http://famfamfam.com/

more aimed towards building web apps than deciding where to put your blog, but someone from wuffoo strongly recommended against subdomains http://particletree.com/notebook/subdomains-development-sucks/

You may want to experiment with adding an "Emotional State" option to your support form following the Wufoo approach. They say that a large number of people fill it out and the byproduct is that people use calmer language because they are conveying how they feel through the dropdown instead of having to do it in the text. edit: Here's the link to their blog post: http://particletree.com/features/on-asking-users-for-their-feelings/

This could be a great way to ask users for their feelings when an error occurs, like the Wufoos suggest -- "right now I'm feeling (adjective) about it": http://particletree.com/features/on-asking-users-for-their-feelings/

Yes you're crazy :-) I love it! If you find entrepreneurs who'll be willing to share details like these: http://particletree.com/features/web-app-autopsy/ ...then you hit a goldmine. So my suggestion is to go and find start-ups that are not yet well known and get no attention from the bloggers, but are willing to share their numbers. Publish your case stories as freemium PDF's with kickback to the entrepreneurs. Best of luck!

A few points: The transform we use loses color/detail and could be prettier. There are better methods that are less lossy (and more proprietary) but this kinds/sorta works. We'll probably swap out a better one eventually (supporting other colorblindness types). The whole architecture of taking screen shots is very hacky. We were thinking of a firefox addon to automate stuff (we could also deliver the whole screen and maybe enable flash/javascript) but would love to hear other ideas. Atleast partially inspired by a post by Chris from wufoo: http://particletree.com/features/interfaces-and-color-blindness/. Not a bad way to spend a few evenings :) and we'd love to get some HN feedback/ideas of other related things we could do.

Hey Aaron, for that, I'm going to have to take the blame and offer my apologies. (I think I apologized before, but here it is again). Your nitpicks were actually really great feedback and addressed the kind of design details that make all the difference between what's good enough and what's great in an interface. Unfortunately, they were 1) covering stuff that was near the bottom of our priority stack because we were just trying to launch at that point 2) I was still an asshole during that period and hadn't fully learned the value of users yet: http://particletree.com/notebook/reflections-of-an-interface-designer/ I offer no excuses. Thanks again for taking the time to help us then and I'm sorry that I left a bad impression for my reactions.

+1 for pmarca. Also http://particletree.com/ if it was updated more often - but I guess they're going for quality over quantity, which is fine by me. Thanks for the post, will add some of those to my reading list.

As someone who basically thinks CSS is a great idea, I have mixed feelings about this article. On the one hand it's a rather silly rant, and is downright wrong in several places. On the other hand, CSS has a number of irritating limitations. However, overall I'd say that the real problem is the dog-slow speed of inclusion of new CSS features by certain browser developers, and the even more glacial up-take of more modern browsers by a large class of users. A lot of the real problems in the article would be solved by people ditching Internet Explorer. As it is, I spend an awful lot of my time writing workarounds for its broken DOM and box model. 1. Curvy corners I'm not sure what the author's obsession with JavaScript fixes is. There are plenty of pure CSS rounded corner implementations. However, they are universally horrible, involving large amounts of junk markup and/or image backgrounds. 2. Vertical floats. What do floats have to do with vertical positioning? The problem, however, is real enough. This one is a perfect example of the "We could do this easily with tables" class of CSS layout problems. 3. Formatting for forms. In this case, the author doesn't go far enough. Laying out and styling forms with CSS is a horrible job; at work we have an entire JavaScript package to help out. As far as layout goes, though, a few floated divs tend to deal with most problems. The real problem is when you don't have control over the markup, for example when using the…

atarimae hinshitsu A pen will write. miryokuteki hinshitsu A pen will write in a way that is pleasing to the writer AND leave behind ink that is pleasing to the reader. http://particletree.com/features/the-importance-of-design-in-business/

I've not seen that post, but I'll read anything with dinosaurs in it. Fromm's ideas are very interesting to me. The one you think doesn't apply (about getting users' feelings), actually does. I talked about it a bit in the lecture, but you can read something more detailed here about our emotional dropdown field: http://www.particletree.com/features/on-asking-users-for-their-feeling…

This reminds me of Kevin Hale's post on Calculating Color Contrast for Legible Text: http://www.particletree.com/notebook/calculating-color-contrast-for-le…

Remind's me of Fitts's Law: http://particletree.com/features/visualizing-fittss-law/

almost identical to the particletree buttons from almost 4(!) years ago http://particletree.com/features/rediscovering-the-button-element/

I wonder if something like Wufoo's "emotional state" field could help get you more detailed feedback. http://particletree.com/features/on-asking-users-for-their-feelings/

If that whet your appetite. Here are two more resources: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1527404 ( ruby focused ) http://particletree.com/notebook/calculating-color-contrast-for-legibl… ( The above makes reference to it )

Found the links for the "Web App Autopsy" and also a related talk, & link to the 2nd talk's slides (original links to the slides from RWW are broken): http://particletree.com/features/web-app-autopsy/ http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sxsw_the_figures_behind_top_web_a… http://www.slideshare.net/dcancel/barenaked-app-the-figures-behind-web…

Btw, these are the types of links I am looking for: http://particletree.com/notebook/the-underbelly-of-a-web-app/ http://particletree.com/notebook/the-underbelly-of-a-web-app-part-2/

I think Particle Tree had better coverage of the subject of styling input buttons, and using semantically more useful "button" elements: http://particletree.com/features/rediscovering-the-button-element/

Yes, pay the money. This is probably not what you want to hear, but I would consider consulting a business attorney to get these docs drawn up. I'm reminded of this: http://particletree.com/notebook/a-tale-of-two-legal-paths/

Old, but good: http://particletree.com/notebook/today-is-the-day/

This isn't meant to be an accurate analysis, but it gets halfway there. Have your grain of salt ready. Wufoo has pretty standard conversion rates of 7% signup, 15% free -> paid. Each paid user nets about $13/mo. (http://particletree.com/features/web-app-autopsy/) Compete (500k/mo | http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wufoo.com/) and Quantcast(250k/mo | http://www.quantcast.com/wufoo.com) have vastly different total traffic numbers, but Quantcast suggests that only 15% of their traffic are regular users. MY GUESS: Their monthly active users are probably between 30k-75k. 30% of their active users are paid users. I'd say they make about 250k/mo.

You bring up a good point. Right now, we're still small so everyone has a support day and talks to users almost daily. At this size, we all appreciate the close communication with the people using our product and we write those cards out of free will (not just a job description). Chris wrote more about it here: http://particletree.com/notebook/the-4-12-day-workweek/ Now, as the company grows, this may have to be adjusted. The cards did not start as some marketing stunt, and we never want that message to be sent to our users. When cards from developer X don't feel personal enough, we'll have to brainstorm some more creative ways to thank our users.

37Signals stuff, Wufoo, BlinkSale, Flickr, Freshbooks, RescueTime, Harvest, etc. If you want some good data, you'll really want to read this: http://particletree.com/features/web-app-autopsy/

eBay was not in the first 10. First/Early mover is a very mixed bag with most of the example of "first/early" turning out to be "one that we remember now." Some other counter-examples: Palm (something like 47th PDA, well after the Newton for example), iPhone, MP3 player (iPod), Google, Microsoft (e.g. Excel, IE, Word, Powerpoint,...). See also NSF study http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf04305/pdf/tab11a.pdf (hat tip to http://particletree.com/notebook/first-mover-advantage/ )

Some blogs from my Google Reader: Functioning Form: http://www.lukew.com/ff/ flow|state: http://miksovsky.blogs.com Bokardo (social design): http://bokardo.com WeBreakStuff: http://blog.webreakstuff.com/ 37signals: http://37signals.com/svn ParticleTree: http://particletree.com/ Jensen Harris (Office 2K7): http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/ Usability in the News: http://www.usernomics.com/news/user-interface-design-news.html

Good. Simple and straight fwd. You will see a 15% growth once you add other features (maybe Gmap, Google calendar syncrho, etc...) and you will see a 90% growth once you read and apply this http://particletree.com/features/the-importance-of-design-in-business/